A Courageous Little Gallery Takes on MOMA

For the past few weeks, Callicoon Fine Arts, a gallery occupying an unassuming storefront on Forsyth Street, has been hosting a show by the artist Jason Simon that audaciously takes on the mighty Museum of Modern Art. Simon is showing his photographs of neoclassical bank buildings that have been repurposed by high-end retail companies, and a series of books he created commemorating the demise of the much-loved Film Stills Archive department that MOMA ran for decades. The exhibit encapsulates what New York’s Lower East Side was and continues to be: a vital alternative to Big Art and Big Business.

Simon himself helped establish that tradition. Back in the mid-aughts, he was one of twelve artists who ran Orchard 47, a pioneering gallery in the neighborhood, whose socially and politically driven exhibits—like one that focussed on the Socialist avant-garde work of nineteen-seventies Polish artists, and another dedicated to low-income transgender communities—tried to foster robust cultural dialogue through art. The gallery closed in 2008, after a three-year lease on the space ran out. By then, the careers of many of its members—including Andrea Fraser, R. H. Quaytman, Gareth James and Simon’s wife, Moyra Davey—had taken off, leaving them busy focussing on their own work.

Simon’s show at Callicoon is reminiscent of the shows at Orchard 47, combining socially conscientious subject matter with a severe academic aesthetic. It also belongs to the Orchard 47 gang’s approach to art-making, known as “institutional critique,” a mode of probing the workings and assumed functions of art institutions. The two series of works—the bank photographs and the books—are linked by the idea of the loss of institutions in New York (and elsewhere) that served the needs of a particular population.

MOMA’s Film Stills Archive (F.S.A.), for one, provided an important service to the film community. It contained some four million still photographs taken by hired photographers who were sent to film sets to generate promotional material—a collection dating all the way back to the silent era. Whenever researchers or filmmakers needed to find out more about the behind-the-scenes making of a film, or wanted a print from a movie for one of their projects, they would turn to the F.S.A. Its curator, Mary Corliss, who ran the department for thirty-four years, and her longtime co-worker Terry Geesken, were extremely knowledgeable custodians of the archive, which offered its collection at affordable prices. “For fifteen dollars you would get a custom still with no licensing fees and all rights granted,” Simon told me as we sat in a café two doors down from the old Orchard 47 space (now the home of the Rachel Uffner gallery).

When MOMA announced, in 2002, that it would be closing the Film Stills Archive, the news was met with outrage. (Roger Ebert wrote an indignant letter to the Times.) Simon’s show is an attempt to call attention to the events that precipitated this decision. In the work, he has combined an interview he did with Corliss earlier this year with the legal documents about the union-led strike that Corliss helped to wage against the museum in 2000 into a ten-and-a-half-by-twelve-and-a-half inch book.

The strike came about when MOMA decided to embark on a $650 million expansion and renovation. Two years later, when the museum shuttered its doors in Manhattan and relocated temporarily to Long Island City, the archive was shipped to a preservation center in Pennsylvania—and Corliss and Geeksen’s jobs were indefinitely terminated. Convinced that her firing was directly linked to her leading role in the strike, Corliss—and other employees who lost their jobs—turned to the National Labor Relations Board. An initial judgment ruled in Corliss’s and the other employees’ favor, but a subsequent proceeding, in 2006, came to a different conclusion. By including the text of the two judgments about the case, Simon wants “people to decide for themselves” about the museum’s motivation for the shutting down of the F.S.A.

In the interview Simon did with Corliss, she lambasts the museum for never reopening the archive, and though it’s clear she misses her job—despite the fact that she was only making fifty thousand dollars a year after thirty-four years—she truly seems to mourn the loss of this crucial service that the museum once provided. “They broke their trust as a museum: to care for these visual artifacts and make them available to the public,” she tells Simon. “That’s the real tragedy.”

Simon’s books are displayed on one set of shelves, allowing viewers to sift through them. A row of boxes against the gallery’s windows contains sealed copies, for sale for between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty dollars. Owning one is like owning a piece of New York, MOMA, and film history all at once. The books amount to an archiving of an archive: they are an attempt to create a permanent physical record of a trove of important documents that MOMA, as the show implies, has abandoned in its aggrandizing ambitions. (Although the museum continues to hold invaluable film festivals, retrospectives, and series through its Department of Film.)

The loss of permanence is also the underlying theme behind the second part of Simon’s show—photos of neoclassical former banks around the world. On display next to the photographs is a framed essay written by John Strauss, a friend of the artist’s, in the nineteen-eighties during the height of Reaganomics. His ideas still ring true. Strauss describes how banks had given up any sense of responsibility to a locale, a population, a nation, or even a specific economy, and instead saw themselves as global corporations. Simon’s photographs underscore the irony that the elaborate and beautifully ornate structures once built to house banks have now become sites for Marc Jacobs, Tiffany’s and Nespresso stores—places where tourists come to spend cash rather than institutions where the local community saves money.

The unframed, page-sized shots of the banks, covered in thin glass and pinned side by side all along one wall, look like average stock photographs. But their blandness effectively evokes the soullessness of the businesses housed in the buildings they picture. All together, they function as a reminder that certain buildings have a very specific architectural language—meant to communicate sturdiness and monumentality in the case of these old banks—and when buildings are repurposed, this language loses its meaning.

The fact that Simon’s show takes place in the Lower East Side is fitting. It’s the area where his photo project began; he got the idea for the photographs when he saw that one of the neighborhood’s banks had been turned into a shabu shabu restaurant. It is also where Orchard 47 resided, and remains a place where the art scene functions as a community. Gallery-going in the neighborhood is remarkably different from the experience in Chelsea. The galleries are smaller, providing a more intimate contact with the art, and unlike in Chelsea, the dealers themselves are almost always perched behind their galleries’ front desks. The art is certainly cheaper, and uninhibitedly brazen. A show at Reena Spaulings gallery by the British artist Merlin Carpenter, which ran around the same time as Simon’s (it just closed), dealt with the financial preoccupations of London’s own modern art behemoth: the Tate. Carpenter’s recreated the Tate Café, down to a fridge containing Tate-labeled food and a cash register, offering a critique of the superfluous products sold by museums as a way to generate further revenue.

The L.E.S. dealers here attend each other’s openings, invite each other to their art events, and frequent the same bars. And while there are many more galleries now than in Simon’s day—there are now more than seventy, with new ones cropping up every week; Callicoon Fine Arts, run by the young and sprightly Photi Giovanis, is less than a year old—the galleries in the neighborhood continue to follow the precepts set by the artists of Orchard 47: they provide a bracing counterpart to Chelsea and the rest of the art world whose colossal inflation (as Peter Schjeldahl recently noted in an article on art fairs) is reflected both in the scale of its architecture and price of its art. “I give Photi a huge amount of credit for doing this show,” Simon told me. “It’s very courageous for a young struggling gallery to do something like this when MOMA is such a monolith in the market.”

Photographs courtesy Callicoon Fine Arts.

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